How To Make a Terrorist

You aren’t born a terrorist. You become one. And Raymond Luc Levasseur became one for many reasons: his Quebecois blood and his French-Canadian roots, objects of discrimination and racism in the factories of Sanford, Maine where he was born and grew up. The Vietnam War, for which he enlisted to flee discrimination and the exploitation of workers, before discovering on the ground in Vietnam another type of racism, just as revolting, practiced by the army whose colors he was wearing.

After his return from Vietnam, Levasseur became a political militant defending the rights of the poor and the exploited. Then, in the mid-1970s, finding that things weren’t changing quickly enough, like many young revolutionaries of his day — those of the Red Brigades and the Quebec Liberation Front, as well as the Baader-Meinhof Gang — he co-founded the United Freedom Fighters, a small Marxist organization. Pretty quickly, they started placing bombs, targeting big American companies like Union Carbide, IBM and Mobil, as well as courthouses and military installations.

With the United Freedom Fighters, Raymond Luc Levasseur lived underground for almost 10 years before being captured in 1984. After a trial for conspiracy and sedition with his accomplices, baptized the Ohio7, Levasseur was sentenced to 45 years in prison.

Today, out of prison, he is the subject of a documentary by the filmmaker Pierre Marier: “An American: Portrait of Raymond Luc Levasseur,” which is showing at the Cinematheque Quebecois.

At first, it was going to be a film about the descendants of French Canadians who migrated to New England between 1840 and 1930 in search of a better life. But to make the film interesting, there had to be striking and colorful characters. Paul Lepage, governor of Maine, a Catholic Republican on the extreme right who supports Donald Trump, was foreseen, but he refused to participate in the project. That was how in the course of his research, the filmmaker discovered Levasseur, the son of Sanford, father of three children and a terrorist, who was, for a while, one of the 10 most wanted men in the United States. The filmmaker found him in a quiet little town in Maine where Levasseur has lived since his release in 2004.

The filmmaker himself admits that Levasseur is a poised, prudent, extremely gentle man. You have no trouble believing him. In fact, it’s the first thing that strikes you in the film: the gentleness, the kindness, and the intelligence of this Franco-American, proud of his Quebec roots and who regrets bitterly having renounced the French language of which he was ashamed as a child.

Levasseur is so sympathetic and his political arguments are so convincing that you end up forgetting the terrorist acts he committed and that, ultimately, ended in immense failure. First on a personal and familial level, since his three children, who had nothing to do with the story, paid dearly for the unfortunate acts of their father from whom they were separated for so long a time. And then on the political level, since Big Business, which Levasseur and his acolytes were trying to destabilize, has continued to flourish and is today 100 times richer and more powerful than it was at the time.

Nothing can justify terrorism, even a terrorism like that of the United Freedom Fighters, which only targeted buildings and concrete and never human beings, despite an incident that left 22 injured. Nonetheless, through Levasseur’s journey, we determine a certain fear about the evolution of terrorism between the ’70s and today. In this regard, Raymond Levasseur has nothing to do with modern-day terrorists who want to blow up buildings so as to kill as many civilians as possible.

Today, along with rebellion, which is the basic ingredient of terrorism, there are added not coherent political ideas advocating equality and social justice, but unfortunate fundamentalist acts, sprinkled with mental illness.

Please understand me: I am not saying that Levasseur’s terrorism was better or more humane. Only that in our world, each era seems to want to make its own recipe for terrorism and that today’s attains new heights of unequaled horror and violence.

Apart from this, this documentary doesn’t really explain to us how we make a terrorist in the sense that Levasseur wasn’t the only son or grandson of French Canadian workers slowly dying in the factories of poverty. Why did he alone choose the path of terrorism and not those who grew up at the same time as him in the same conditions? It’s a mystery. His portrait remains a document of interest, if only because we have a tendency to put all Franco-Americans in the same box, forgetting the diversity of their journeys, leading Paul Lepage to power and Raymond Levasseur to prison.

But as the filmmaker writes, Raymond Levasseur’s story, both typical of his generation and counter-current, deserves to be told.